• The music of the United States reflects the country’s multi-ethnical population through a diverse array of styles.

Among the country's most internationally-renowned genresare: Jazz, Blues, Rock, Country, Punk, and Hip Hop

• Native Americanswere the earliest inhabitants of the land that istoday known as the United States andplayed its firstmusic. TheNative Americansplayed the first folk music in what is now the United States,using a wide variety of styles and techniques.

Traditional instrumentations uses the flute and

many kinds of percussion instruments, like

drums, rattles and shakers.

• Since European and African contact was established, Native American folk music has grown in new directions, into fusions with disparate styles likeEuropean folk dances.

• New American folk music reflects the migrant population arriving here by the hundreds of thousands

European Influence

The patriotic songs of theAmerican Revolutionconstituted the first kind ofmainstream popular music.These included "The LibertyTree", by Thomas Paine.

Patriotic songs were mostlybased on:•English melodies, with new lyrics;•others, however, used tunesfrom Ireland, Scotland etc;•did not use a familiar melody.

The song “Hail Columbia" was a major work that remained an unofficial national anthem until the adoption of “The Star-Spangled Banner".

Classical

Music

• The

European

classical

music

tradition

was brought

to the

United

States with

some of the

first

colonists.

The central

norms of

• By the beginning of the 20th century, many American composers were incorporating disparate elements into their work, ranging from jazz and blues to Native American music.

The Most significant early American Composer was George Gershwin. Gershwin wrote songs with his brother Ira that were very popular pop songs.

George would also write the first great American classical music. He would incorporate Jazz into his classical compositions, much like 19th century composers like Tchaikovsky would incorporate Russian folk elements into his work.

• Blues is a

combination of

African work

songs, field

hollers and

shouts. It

developed in

the rural South

in the first

decade of the

20th century.

• The most important characteristics of the blues is its use of the blue scale, as well as the typically lamenting lyrics.

• delta blues artist Robert Johnson and piedmont blues artist Blind Willie McTell.

• A bluesy style of gospel also became popular in the 1950s, led by singer Mahalia Jackson.

Blues became a part of American popular music in the 1920s, when classic female blues singers like Bessie Smith grew popular.

Though jazz had long since achieved some limited popularity, it was Louis Armstrong who became one of the first popular stars and a major force in the development of jazz, along with his friend pianist Earl Hines. Armstrong, Hines and their colleagues were improvisers, capable of creating numerous variations on a single melody.

Armstrong also popularized scat singing, an improvisational

vocal technique in which nonsensical syllables are sung.

Armstrong and Hines were influential in the rise of a kind of

pop big band jazz called swing.

The later 20th century American jazz scene produced some popular crossover stars, such as Miles Davis.

In the middle of the 20th century,jazzevolved into a variety ofsubgenres, beginning with bebop.

Bebop was developed in the early and mid-1940s, later evolving into styles like hard bop and free jazz.

Innovators of the style includedCharlieParker and Dizzy Gillespie.

• The United States has produced many popular musicians and composers in the modern world. Beginning with the birth of recorded music, American performers have continued to lead the field of popular music.

• Other authors typically look at popular music, tracing American popular music to spirituals, minstrel shows and vaudeville, or the patriotic songs of the Civil War.

Most histories

of popular

music start

with American

ragtime or Tin

Pan Alley;others, however, trace

popular music back to

the European

Renaissance and

through

broadsheets, ballads

and other popular

traditions.

The minstrel show was invented by Dan Emmett and the

Virginia Minstrels.

• Minstrel shows produced the first well-remembered popular songwriters in American music history: Thomas D. Rice, Dan Emmett, and, most famously, Stephen Foster.

• In the early 20th century, American musical theatre was a major source for popular songs. The center of development for this style was in New York City, where the Broadway theatres appeared. Theatrical composers and lyricists like the brothers George and Ira Gershwin created a uniquely American theatrical style that used American vernacular speech and music. Musicals featured popular songs and fast-paced plots that often revolved around love and romance.

Country music is a fusion of African American blues andspirituals with Appalachian folk music, adapted for popaudiences and popularized beginning in the 1920s.

Anglo-Celtic tunes, dance music, and balladry were the earliest predecessors of modern country, then known as hillbilly music.

• The origins of country are in rural Southern folk music, which was primarily Irish and British, with African and continental European musics.

• The earliest country instrumentation revolved around the European-derived fiddle and the African-derived banjo, with the guitar later added. String instruments like the ukulele and steel guitar became commonplace due to the popularity of Hawaiian musical groups in the early 20th century.

•Hank Williams

•Johnny Cash

Rock and roll

developed out of

country, blues, and

R&B. Though

squarely in the blues

tradition, rock took

elements from Afro-

Caribbean and Latin

musical techniques.

Rock and roll first entered popular music through a

style called rockabilly. Black-performed rock and

roll had previously had limited mainstream

success, but it was the white performer Elvis

Presley who first appealed to mainstream

audiences with a black style of music.

• In the 1960s and early 1970s, rock music diversified. What was formerly a discrete genre known as rock and roll evolved into a catchall category called simply rock music, which came to include diverse styles like heavy metal and punk rock.

Punk was a form of rebellious rock, that was loud, aggressive and often very simple.American bands in the field included, most famously, The Ramones .

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• Heavy metal is characterized by aggressive, driving rhythms, amplified and distorted guitars, grandiose lyrics and virtuosic instrumentation.

• Blue Öyster Cult

• KISS

• Aerosmith.

The United States was especially

known for one of these

subgenres, thrash metal, which

was innovated by bands like:

Anthrax

Metallica

Megadeth

Slayer.

• Hardcore, punk, and garage rock were the roots of alternative rock.

• Nirvana• Pearl Jam• Green Day• The Offspring• Rancid• Bad Religion• NOFX

• R&B, an abbreviation for rhythm andblues, is a style that arose in the 1930s

and 1940s.

• People like James Brown popularized soul and R & B in the 50s and 60s

Tina Turner

Michael Jackson

PrinceWhitney Houston

Rap Music

Rap Music

• So, American music is

a “fusion vat” while it

unites different styles

and techniques, bears

new directions and

develops into an

extremely diverse and

colourful phenomena.

• The #1 contributing

factor to the evolution

of American music is

immigration.